It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. In the last two years, the issue of waste exports to China has attractedconsiderable mediaand public attention. According to the report, his wife was forced to confess that before her marriage, she had spent 60,000 on plastic surgery in South Korea, and looked completely different to how she was born. The film does not tell its audience how this situation came about, but it is easy to associate it with rural migrants generally limited access to healthcare. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. This prompted the Chinese government to introduce a raft of new laws and regulations to limit plastic waste in 2020, and announced a plan for 2021 to 2025 which aims to further improve the management of the entire chain of plastic pollution. On July 16 that year, as Beijing was gearing up to hold the Summer Olympics, Zhang flagged the sudden increase of infant cases to his hospital's dean, who then reported them to the local health. In the U.S. alone, some 26.7 million tons were sent out of the country between 1988 and. China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2 The move is the Communist Party's latest attempt to reverse declining birthrates and avert a population crisis, but experts say it. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images Plastic China 's portrait of a migrant worker and his family, and the factory's ambitious owner, is touching and saddening, and puts a human face on the problems caused by China's rush to. And so, ironically, now that people are allowed to have more children, they are increasingly reluctant to, because of the high cost of child care and education. Its a moving film about the individuals left to deal with the First Worlds trash, and while I enjoy documentaries that throw big, scary facts at me, I believe Wang omitted some objective information for a reason. 0000000936 00000 n You might also like: Solution for Plastic Pollution: 6 Policies and Innovations Tackling Plastics, Featured image by: Sheila/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. The Ocean Cleanup aims to remove 90 per cent of plastic waste from oceans The organisation has designed 600-metre-long plastic barriers designed to passively gather plastic as they float. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. In March 2018, China's environment minister at the time, Li Ganjie, noted that China used to import around 4 to 4.5 million tons of solid, unrecyclable trash. Just like Beijing Besieged by Waste, the movie uncovers a gnarly scene beyond the cosmopolitan city. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. "There is no point in controlling them. 0000022087 00000 n Now they are stepping away from a plastics lobbying . In another one, he explained, in reference to the films title that: The [word] plastic here has two meanings: first it refers to the plastic waste, but at a deeper level it refers to the weakness beneath our surface prosperity;the way plastic surgery only improves appearance, not the reality. Acquiring this potent status symbol allows them to have the feelingand give others the impressionthat they have achieved wealth, and moved up the social ladder. In this essay, I argue that Plastic China should be considered as a rich social commentary and critique, and interpreted in the light of Chinas tradition of independent documentary-making in the reform era. In 2020 alone, China produced about 60 million tonnes of plastic waste, yet only 16 million tonnes of which was recycled, according to the China National Resources Recycling Association. It forces us to re-examine our waste habits and confront the reality that every time we throw out our beloved Tim Hortons coffee cups, we are poisoning our environment at an alarming rate. One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. Moreover, Plastic China contains virtually no direct criticism of any government, state-owned enterprise, or other powerful entitya key difference with Under the Dome (qiong ding zhi xia 2015), another documentary on Chinas environmental predicament that also went viral and disappeared from the Internet in a matter of days. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. You need an active subscription to post a comment. This has lead to a major shift in China, family is now seen as the 3 living generations . So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. hide caption. In China recycling is done by the trash collectors who specialize in different kinds of refuse rubber, aluminum, tin, plastic, paper and either collect these materials by going house to house or sort through the garbage, selling what they find to traders. The weeklong meeting of the National People's Congress, which rubber stamps policies approved by the Communist Party leadership, provides a window into government priorities. Two of the more tragic examples - who were born identical twins and appear to be twinning themselves with duelling plastic surgeries - are French TV stars Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff. by China's decision to focus on domestic recycling in an effort to clean up their own landfills is a slap in the face to our First World consumer culture. Today, the ongoing secrecy and censorship makes it impossible to know how many died that night. Please help us make our goal! That was a period where China's growth started booming. This brings us to the topic of censorship. Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. A deliberate shift in consumption will not happen overnight. 0000017854 00000 n SCn ` ]-3 endstream endobj 44 0 obj <>>> endobj 45 0 obj <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageC]/Properties<>/XObject<>>>/Rotate 0/TrimBox[0.0 0.0 595.276 841.89]/Type/Page>> endobj 46 0 obj [47 0 R] endobj 47 0 obj <>/Border[0 0 0]/H/N/Rect[248.776 776.077 346.366 766.333]/Subtype/Link/Type/Annot>> endobj 48 0 obj <> endobj 49 0 obj <> endobj 50 0 obj <> endobj 51 0 obj <> endobj 52 0 obj <> endobj 53 0 obj <>stream And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. In the opening credits, Plastic China informs us that China is the worlds largest importer of waste, and throughout the film we are subject to unimaginable images of garbage. , resulting in mounting plastic packaging. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. At some point, Wang Kun pushes for Yijie to attend a local kindergarten, even offering to cover the costs, yet Yijies father, Peng Wenyuan, refuses, preferring that she continue to sort plastics, do household chores, and take care of her younger siblings. Image from 'Plastic China' documentary website. Giving birth to him was a huge risk and she took no chances. Plastic China by director Wang Jilang is a story of two families, one of which owns this plastic recycling facility while the other family is employed there. 0000439869 00000 n Wangs second film, Plastic China, depicts the life of two families of former peasants who make a living by recycling plastic waste of foreign origin in Shandong Province, and emphasises their wretched living and working conditions. "All we can do is go on living," she says. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . 0000023972 00000 n Even before China's ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. Image by: Our World in Data. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. When I see the value in something, and its necessary to communicate it to a mass audience, any obstacles that might stop me, they dont exist, he said. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. The picture of Chinas gender regime that emerges from Plastic China is one of entrenched patriarchy, at least in the countryside, where boys are still valued more than girls (zhongnan qingn). (Liu 2014). In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident, attributed largely to the fact that the country is the worlds biggest producer and consumer of plastics. Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. The British colony simply. Enforcement of the policy had begun to loosen by the early 2000s, as horrific stories of forced abortions and botched sterilizations caused policymakers to rethink the rule. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. The photographer-turned-director's debut documentary, 2011's Beijing Besieged by. In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son. The global plastic pollution crisis continues to worsen every year. CNN . one-child policy, official program initiated in the late 1970s and early '80s by the central government of China, the purpose of which was to limit the great majority of family units in the country to one child each. In 2012, Chen escaped by scaling a wall and running to the next village, despite being blind and having broken his foot during the escape. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. Until there is a. The limit in most cases was just one child. The question remains, however, whether this was worth the enormous sacrifice in financial security, and viewers are left wondering what will happen to the family if Wang Kun is diagnosed with a serious illness. The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. To subscribe to email alerts for each issue of the Journal, newly published books, and information about upcoming events, please provide your contact information below. hb```"qVta1 FsD This ambitious plan requires the full participation of producers to consumers and is an inspirational idea, though I hadnt even heard of it before digging through plastic research, and it doesnt seem to be very widely discussed. Since the first protest on Nov. 26th, demonstrations popped up in every area of the country. It's margarine tubs, clamshells, deli containers. Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. The insane volume of sorted scraps are pushed through a machine that turns the plastic into a gross, grey sludge before it is transformed into small grey pellets. Once again, though, Wang has a holistic way of tackling the issue, and his real concern is Chinas changing relationship to the land under capitalisma broad project if there ever was one. In the cinema version of Plastic China, the concept of labour exploitation applies more clearly within China and even among former peasants than it does between China and the highly industrialised countries from which waste is imported. This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . 0000001204 00000 n The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. There are two younger boys, Liu Zhuang, 5 and Liu Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. "A very unbalanced population gender-wise has also led to a rise in property prices in major cities because families of men have bought apartments to make their sons eligible in a marriage market where there are millions of missing women," says Mei Fong, who wrote a book on the one-child rule. 0000020209 00000 n discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. Director Jiu-Liang Wang refers to PLASTIC CHINA as a title which riffs on the idea of plastic surgerya way of masking the underlying physical truth of any given situation. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. The REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. We promise, no spam! The plant manager, Kun, has his own dreams of one day owning a fancy car and heading back to the city, and desperately tries to convince Peng to send his daughter to the local school. Eight to 14 million tons of plastic waste ends up in oceans every single year, causing great harm to marine life, from accidental ingestion and entanglement, to increasing the risk of invasive species, which can throw entire ecosystems off balance. hide caption. In August 2014, the little girl was able to go to school and she is in third grade now. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. Answer (1 of 7): Hi, from the grandchild of 3 families that would probably be considered bourgeois before 49 Family 1: Paternal Grandfather family, granted this was a quirky case as he was the son of a landlord (the most dominant family in that village for sure. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. Boss Kun and his workers separate plastics by burning samples and quickly sniffing the fumes, stimulating God only knows what kinds of cancers and brain damage. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. It is a moment that for many observers has come to define strongman leader Xi Jinping's tightening grip on China: his visibly frail predecessor, Hu Jintao, being escorted out of . From Jun 1 of that year, customers began to be charged for plastic shopping bags, and a total ban of ultrathin (less than 0.025mm thick) bags came into action. what happened to the families in plastic china. To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng attends a rally to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre June 4, 2019, at the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, plastic consumption has soared, adding an extra 25,900 tonnes of plastics in the ocean thats equivalent to more than 2,000 double decker buses. His descendants inherited his d. Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. "I thought this is it if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more.". Without a fundamental cultural shift in our societys grievous over-use of plastic, we will see the same mountains of scraps growing in our pristine backyards just like Peng, Kun, and Yi Jie see everyday. A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. Yet, towards the end of the film, the Wangs spend their entire savingsand even borrow moneyto purchase a vehicle for which they seem to have little practical need. hide caption. This contrasts with the situation of Wang Qiqi, Kuns son, who is sent to the kindergarten so that he can pick up literacy skills early on in the hope that he will get access to a high-earning job later in life, ideally in an office in Beijingit should be noted, however, that Qiqi is not only a boy, but also an only child. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. :v9s];"vE\ j{G=vs=_qq/w?/uynBRBViW)42xP.itM"2HX SJXr/^$,^J_gHIum1$OL@*R*06T4W*[>ypNA-y6J]yPW6VV The law was designed to fight the "White Pollution" caused by plastic packaging, and authorities hoped that a small monetary charge would motivate customers to bring their own reusable . "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. If anything, there is considerable overlap between Wangs film and the foreign waste rhetoric that accompanies state authorities action in the field of transboundary movements of waste since the early 2010s, and predates the ban announced in July 2017. Maybe we would care about the health of those living at the bottom of the social ladder if we were a part their lives for 90 minutes. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. WUHAN, China Zhang Hai has a warning to World Health Organization-led scientists researching the origin of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China: Don't be fooled. Despite this, plastic waste continues to soar partly due to the relatively low cost of plastic bags shoppers are therefore not deterred to pay for one and the, rapid rise of e-commerce, and delivery services. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. Families of people who died after contracting coronavirus in China's former epicentre Wuhan say they are constantly monitored and warned by authorities, who tell them speaking out will damage . It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). By the time the reality show ended in 2007 after 52 episodes across four seasons it was tainted with low ratings and a lot of controversy. He was able to fly to the U.S. after weeks of tense negotiation. 0000010492 00000 n She demurs, her voice growing quiet. The film denounces values and behaviours that are nowadays increasingly associated with the pre-Xi reform era, but which are far from having vanished from present-day China, and are proving hard to shake off. He and his wife persevered and had three sons. But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. Kate Sheehy. If Plastic Chinas message really boiled down to nothing more than a plea against waste imports and the pollution they cause, then the film would not be an obvious target for the Chinese censors. The plan also seeks to promote plastic alternatives such as bamboo, wood and paper (and scientific research into biodegradable plastics) over the next five years, as well as clearing plastic waste from key lakes and rivers, tourist attractions and rural areas. 0000023031 00000 n He has vowed to break with the past, and usher in a new normal (xin changtai)later morphing into a new era (xin shidai)in which the countrys true wealth would reside in clear waters and green mountains (lshui qingshan), and its prosperity would rely on moderate and sustainable growth. His focus on the daily life of two families in a shared domestic space, where exploitation unfolds in an intimate setting, allows him to give an otherwise commonplace phenomenon a particularly raw and emotional dimension. The young girl would love to visit the United States, but shed settle for going to school something her father, Peng, an alcoholic who works for the plant manager, has no interest in making happen. In 2016, the Ontario government released its Strategy for a Waste-Free Ontario, diverting our wasteful ways towards a completely circular economy (zero-waste) by 2050. Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. A recent book helps explain how PRC leaders think about the . Now the world is scrambling to adjust. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. He frightens viewers with images of the relentless plastic flowing through the small factory, preying on our ability to empathize with these poverty-stricken laborers. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. 0000017207 00000 n one of the fairly recent ancesto. Following Pen and his daughter Yi Jie, under the watchful eye of boss Kun, this film shows the lives of those harmed most by severe social inequality. 0000016680 00000 n 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n Some businesses have stepped up, too. A magazine advertisement for the Sandals Resorts looks like paradise; catalogs with computer parts offer up opportunities to build paper versions of electronics she could never afford. While the ban has potentially helped China reduce its domestic plastic pollution, it barely made a dent in reducing global waste and instead, shifted the responsibility to other poorer countries. This change will not be easy, but it must be done. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. 0000024672 00000 n If single-use plastic production remains at the current trajectory of growth, they could account for five to 10% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, further exacerbating climate change. And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. , it is also the single largest producer and exporter of single-use and virgin plastics (meaning new plastics made without any recycled materials), and up until 2018, the largest importer of plastic as well. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. There is one obvious, clear, imperative measure that we all must make a priority- we must reduce the amount of plastics we use every day. 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